The Ethic of the Essential
Monday, March 5, 2007, 08:09 PM - Theory, Copyfight
In Behind the curtain, Milan Kundera mourns the death of the novel by what he calls the ethic of the archive, the collectionist fever that merges all material produced by an stablished genius with what was intended for publishing -the finished artwork- by the author himself.
(...) "the work" is what the writer will approve in his own final assessment. For life is short, reading is long, and literature is in the process of killing itself off through an insane proliferation. Every novelist, starting with his own work, should eliminate whatever is secondary, lay out for himself and for everyone else the ethic of the essential.
But it is not only the writers, the hundreds and thousands of writers; there are also the researchers, the armies of researchers who, guided by some opposite ethic, accumulate everything they can find to embrace the Whole, a supreme goal. The Whole, which includes a mountain of drafts, deleted paragraphs, chapters rejected by the author but published by researchers, in what are called "critical editions", under the perfidious title "variants", which means, if words still have meaning, that anything the author wrote is worth as much as anything else, that it would be similarly approved by him.
The ethic of the essential has given way to the ethic of the archive. (The archive's ideal: the sweet equality that reigns in an enormous common grave.)
Along with his complaint there is a comment on what belongs to the artist and the concept of natural ownership.
Let us remember: before Cervantes had completed the second volume of his novel, another writer, still unknown, preceded him by publishing, under a pseudonym, his own sequel to the adventures of Don Quixote. Cervantes reacted at the time the way a novelist would react today: with rage. He attacked the plagiarist violently and proudly proclaimed, "Don Quixote was born for me alone, and I for him. He knew about action, I about writing. He and I are simply one single entity."
Since Cervantes, this has been the primary, fundamental mark of a novel: it is a unique, inimitable creation, inseparable from the imagination of a single author. Before he was written, no one could have imagined a Don Quixote; he was the unexpected itself, and, without the charm of the unexpected, no great novel character (and no great novel) would ever be conceivable again.
The birth of the art of the novel was linked to the consciousness of an author's rights and to their fierce defence. The novelist is the sole master of his work; he is his work. It was not always thus, and it will not always be thus. But when that day comes, then the art of the novel, Cervantes's legacy, will cease to exist.
Read the entire paper at The Guardian.
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